


Somewhere between Waking and Sleeping

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: Love is a Journey, not a Destination [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Resolution, Smut, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 10:29:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13855932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Following on from the Rhymes of Goodbye. Will takes on a new name and journeys towards the rest of his life.





	Somewhere between Waking and Sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> Another re-posting of one of the earlier Vakkrehejm stories.

Thomas is in the far North when he decides to go hunting.

He has to do something. Forty days have passed, and a thousand more nights. Some in the desert, some in other places. He has seen pyramids of neon ice, pyramids of bitter stone. He may as well have been staring at the mudbrick walls of the compound.

By now, the prickling beneath his skin is nearly constant, as if he was forever crouched, turned inside-out, in the wind-shorn grass that crests the dull dunes. 

There are a few other, equally solitary observers besides Thomas, tourists come up the coast to stare at the lunging rorqual. He wonders how many of them are fugitives in their own way. Wary of being scrutinised himself, he abandons them all on the bluff. He is not careful on the vertiginous coastal path; he does not feel any need to be. Below are buildings, tumbled untidily along the mazy quayside road. The sea is abrading them. Destroying them. It is closing their eyes with salt.

Thomas is hardly aware of any of it. He is weary from his migrations. And he is thinking of another building, a white house of wood, maybe in need of a little care and repair, but otherwise sound. He is watching how the clear light falls into that house, luminous across a wall of merbau bookshelves. Across a fondly-contested easy chair. Across a large bed that is perfectly, _achingly_ unmade every time Thomas envisions it.

Thomas has tried, but the house shines in his head a little less brightly each day now. All it takes is a grind of thunder, a moment's distraction, and it is gone again, crushed to splinters by doubt, by the concrete clouds overhead.

His watch alarm chimes. It is tuned to the tides that will return him to his life of waiting and wandering. He stops trudging and looks down. He cannot help but see eroded nails, thinned wrists and, twisting beneath a Jellinge-style strap that he did not buy for himself, and did very little to deserve as a gift, a tangle of darkly bulging veins.

His blood does not belong to him anymore, it would seem. It is flexing, like a new muscle. It is sliding venomously around his body, biting at him from the inside. Because something has been uncaged in Will, and it writhes endlessly in him now.

He would do much to make it stop hurting.

He asks himself, as he wipes the umbered snow from his boots; is he the only one to have this worm inside his heart?

Is this what it's been like, all these years, for Hannibal?

The terrain is perfect. A driftwood jungle of a bar. There are tridents and mermaids on the walls, and a tap-room of easy, preening prey. Most are coupled, discussing the catch.

Uninteresting.

Their noise is unbearably loud after the strange silences of the sea, but Thomas is all focus, and he wants to quiet the squirming thing inside, he really does, so he dismisses the buzzing and clacking, and stands there, shoulders bowed in an uncertain wave of marine-blue wool. He pushes his glasses up the raw ridge of his nose, comely chin dipping to kiss the frayed collar of his pea-coat. He looks around. He appears to be chary of his own rough charms. 

He remembers how to behave this way. Until quite recently, he was legitimately bashful.

Swags of green fluorescent kelp glow over a corner table otherwise submerged in shadow. It turns the tanned skin of the younger man sitting there to verdigris. The suit is a confident check. Piratical charm tailored to suit the purpose.

A commercial traveller.

But the man is swift to engage even though he is clearly not fishing those particular waters. Any loose thread of contact, with the waiter, with the barman, is spun out to the point where Will amends his profile; he is watching a _lonely_ commercial traveller.

The choice is made.

Will moves forward, unbalanced. Genuine trepidation is blending with a predator's pleasure in pretence, and he finds he does not wholly dislike the taste of it in his mouth, so rich and brackish. He licks his lips and wonders if such hungers can be transmitted, man to monster, monster to man? Through one single night of sweat and spit and seed?

The memory of Hannibal loving him is so fierce, so overwhelming, that it physically shakes Will's hand, and he spills his pitcher.

So; the beer is the bait. In the time it takes to sacrifice a cleanly-folded, colour-matched pocket handkerchief to the flood, Thom is sitting down with Greg. Sharing the remainder of the jug is the least that Thom can do. There is reciprocation. The ebb and flow of talk. Like the foamy beer, there is no edge to it, no Bach or Butchvarov to whet his wits on, but while Will is bored out of his mind, he is also vivified. His heart is a pendulum these days, pulsing between fear and mastery of fear. Bailing out and holding course. Wanting and wanting and wanting.

And all the while, as they denigrate foreign cars and the lousy fucking government, Thom openly considers Greg's hands. His muscled shoulders, once the jacket comes off. The lights flicker, and there are longer and longer moments of darkness, of reciprocation. 

Beneath his itching, cringing skin, Will is calculating just how hard Greg could push back. If Greg can scratch, with such neat, squared nails. Will is remembering how it is to be _properly_ clawed, with a knife, with a saw, with love. He kills his nerves with whiskey. A couple of slammed shots for smiling, smiling Thom. A few more than that for Greg.

Somewhere, maybe overhead, maybe over a different sea entirely, there is thunder.

The concrete above them crumbles apart as they leave, the sky spilling grit. Waves, suddenly marbled with yellow and white, slash at them as they weave along the quay wall. Greg is laughing and the bronze curl of his wet hair is catching hail and now Will just wants it to be over.

His blood surges and snakes. His flesh pushes against cheap seams. 

I want, I want, I want, the sore, maggoty part of Will chants.

Greg can't get the key to work in his motel room door, and then he can and they both go in and then Greg is all over sweet Thom. There is some rucking up of layers, some unbuttoning. Thom lets himself be eased up against a wall. The rub of hands is pleasant; his skin is so chilled, lately. He is obliging when Greg slips a thigh between his own. Thom shifts slightly, Greg groans. It is the wrong sound from the wrong person, but Thom has come here for this, to cure himself of whatever precise species of touch-starvation is slowly poisoning him, so he can't really object.

He is, after all, forsaken. Unwanted.

His head goes back, scarred cheek turned to the lightning as it tongues it's way through the shutters. He cannot tell if he is avoiding intrusion or inviting it. Nothing answers anyway; there are no sharp teeth to pluck at his throat.

Greg continues to be competent. Will watches it all from an ocean away, these two people, fooling around. Both are strangers to him, or at least nobody he knows well.

Outside, a dog howls at the static in the air. Will hears it and feels like crying. It is catastrophically wrong. He wants Hannibal.

But Hannibal is gone. Completely. There has been no twine to lead Will back through the labyrinth of his insecurities. No cryptic correspondence, no dripping Valentine. He cannot grumble, he who designed Hannibal's desertion. And yet, he is dying from it. 

So, Will bites his teeth together. Hooks his fingers around Greg. Moans softly in pain.

"Good, huh?" Greg croons, tugging at their trousers. Will exhales brokenly, and shakes his head. His blood is finding nothing here. It is roaring and thrashing in furious disappointment.

Will _sees_. With another man on him, he sees.

His terrible need to be with Hannibal is not a worm, a weakness. It is a serpent. A glorious imperative. Not an infection. A wild joy.

Will realises he has become gradually more unresponsive to Greg's coaxing. And, to be fair, Greg is endeavouring to enthuse. There are endearments and entreaties, but although Will can taste his ardour, he cannot borrow from it.

"Baby, don't be scared." Greg whispers finally, finger to Will's healed face. " I won't hurt you. "

Will stares at Greg. Hearing words that Hannibal has never said to him.

Before Will pulled them down onto the rocks, Hannibal did not bargain for their future. As he dragged Will through the bleak battlefield of their recovery, he did not sue for peace. And even as he left Will for good, Hannibal, the fiend, the prince of lies, the arch-tempter, did not trust himself to say goodbye.

The world beyond is lit up with white fire. Will can smell the sea on the spumy breath blown beneath the motel-room door. The storm will drown people before it pants itself out overland. It will wreck. Swallow. Transform. But still, despite the danger, Will has always loved storms. Sometimes, he has even sought them out, to sail headlong into the electric spindrift. To risk everything for a chance of something.

Will is entirely still for the first time in forty days, an ice-age of nights. There are enough teeth in his sudden smile to make Greg take a step back.

Will has been so god-damned angry with Hannibal, for leaving him rudderless. Unreasonably upset, a therapist would say. But then, their love is like that; a loss of all reason.

The squall helps him slam the door on his way out. He heads towards the dock.

Will is going to seek out his monster, and force him to make a few fucking promises. A vow or two. If necessary, he will beat it into Hannibal that he is never, _ever_ going to be allowed to leave Will again.

Will thinks that this time, hopefully, there will be no escape for either of them.


End file.
